


Breath

by sheafrotherdon



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Episode Tag, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-01-04
Updated: 2009-01-04
Packaged: 2017-10-11 22:43:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,433
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/117957
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sheafrotherdon/pseuds/sheafrotherdon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John regains consciousness in a tumble of noise and memory.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Breath

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks, as ever, to dogeared for indispensable beta duty!

John regains consciousness in a tumble of noise and memory. There's sand between his teeth, the slick twist of morphine in his veins, and the whump-whump-whump of chopper blades is tangled so deep with his instincts, with the steel and shrapnel taste of risk, that all he can think is _heat_ and _danger_ as he tries to pull the oxygen mask away from his face. Someone stops him, firm hands holding down his own, and he tries to make a face out of the indiscriminate military blur that surrounds him.

" . . .goddamn son-of-a-bitch. Do you know how much I hate these things? Why the hell someone hasn't made a helicopter with inertial dampeners yet is beyond me, surely _someone_ has the time to . . ."

John's vision grays as someone presses down hard at his shoulder and fuck, that hurts, even through the dope, and his stomach lurches at the scent of blood. He thinks it's his own.

". . . hey, _hey_ , stay with me here, you self-sacrificing piece of shit. Did I not _tell_ you not to engage? Is this a pattern with you? God help me, it has to be a pattern with you, you're exactly the type, I _always_ . . ."

It's McKay, John realizes, the guy keeping his hands out of the way of the medics, the guy bitching him out at a hundred miles-an-hour. "How?" he croaks, coughing up the words and wincing as he tries to breathe.

"Shut up," McKay says. "Shut up, shut up, shut up and just . . . stay with me, okay? John?"

"Tired," John murmurs, eyes closing. "Been years . . ."

*****

He wakes up in a hospital bed, the underside of his skin, his muscles, his ligaments and bones wearing the imprint of a dozen sets of hands. He can feel – imagination run riot, he knows, but god, he feels it – the scrape of forceps and the slide of thread; his throat is raw from intubation. Eyes still closed, he grunts at the effort of coming to, at the weight in his limbs from anesthesia.

"Ice," someone says gently, and he opens cracked lips, accepts the ice chip with a breath of gratitude, squints to see McKay hovering with a plastic cup. He swallows, maneuvers his expression to ask the question he's not sure he can vocalize. "Shut up," McKay says, but he doesn't sound angry anymore. "Just . . . rest."

McKay's tie is gone, and his jacket too. There's stubble along the line of his jaw, bags under his eyes, and his hair's lost its morning-slick neatness. John blinks slowly, flexing his hands, feeling the faint pressure of the pulse-ox monitor around one finger. He wonders why McKay's hanging around.

An answer comes to him as he begins to slide back under.

McKay knows everything about him.

He knows there's no one to call.

*****

He dreams of the chair, with its strange cathedral architecture, with its stained glass, ocean hue, and as he twists and dives, sky-high on painkillers, he remembers things that never took place; that he reached out to touch it; that the universe opened up to him, his fingertips grazing mere chance.

*****

McKay comes and goes as he pleases, bringing newspapers, a strange collection of paperback books, a bound set of sudoku puzzles that John eases out from under his hand when he falls asleep face-forward on the bed. He has half the book finished when McKay wakes up, and there's a pleasant burn of satisfaction to be had from the way McKay squints at his work, flips through the finished puzzles, looks at him with vague irritation.

"I like math," John says, scratching his jaw where the makings of his beard've begun to itch.

"And here I thought you liked _ballet_ ," McKay says witheringly.

John snorts and flips him the finger. McKay just reaches into his briefcase – angular, well-kept, leather – and tosses him a journal. "Read that," he says, and stalks out of the room.

There's nothing else to do, save drift beneath the memories pulled up from his gut by the stink of disinfectant and the nurses' quiet murmur, so he gives it his best shot, muddling through the tougher math. He realizes, some time in the middle of the night, that he's reading the bare bones theory of rips in space and time, tentative equations like simple notes on a stave, shivering with the prospect of becoming a symphony. He flips to the front of the journal, sees the date and finds McKay's name inked on the page. "Fuck," he whispers, and throws the journal aside, calls the nurse for something to help him sleep before he can take on the guilt of another universe as well as his own.

He's discharged next morning – if discharged is the term for ripping out his IVs and hissing at the sting of broken skin, demanding his clothes and leaving before McKay can come back.

*****

Home's a kissing cousin to the motel rooms in which John's seen the moments-after spill of murder, the flash of a gold ring in a fist aimed at his jaw, the slide of some woman's body against his thighs. His bedroom smells stale, the sheets unwashed, and there's nothing in the refrigerator save molding Chinese food, ketchup, and beer. He twists off a cap, swallows gratefully, the beer cheap and cold and tasting of almost nothing. When he lies on the couch, bottle nestled against his chest, it's because he has nowhere else to be, not because his body aches and his eyes are dry and his car is shot to hell. He had money for a moment, a duffel stuffed tight with some fucked up chance at freedom, but it's likely state's evidence by now. There's a dime and two nickels in his pocket. It's as rich as he gets.

It's dusk when someone hammers at his door, and he surfaces through pain to confusion and readiness, expecting the lock to splinter and Mikey's boys to come finish the job. He doesn't expect McKay, doesn't expect the lock to be picked instead of broken, doesn't expect to stand and have to stare someone down when he barely knows the time of day.

"This ends, right now," McKay says. His cheeks are flushed with color and his tie's askew.

"What ends?" John asks, voice neutral, body held carefully against the throb in his shoulder, the arousal that burns low in his gut. It's easy to ignore – he knows the way pain becomes desperation, the way guys got discharged for purging want and regret. Given enough time, everything tangles up with sex.

McKay steps closer. "You," he spits, and John imagines a dozen kinds of anger in the word, "are too valuable for this shit."

Faked incredulity's never served him well, but John raises an eyebrow anyway. "Which shit?"

"All of it," McKay hisses. "Every bit. I am _done_ with it. You understand me? You have a brain, you had ambition once, you have some fucked up sense of duty enough to wander off into the desert after a threat you barely understand, so don't think I'm willing for a _second_ to concede that yeah, this is good enough, this second-floor shack, this suicide by worked-up nonchalance and fourth-rate beer. E-fucking- _nough_."

John pulls at his flat, warm Bud. "Really."

"Yeah." McKay steps closer yet. "Really."

John can't help but smirk. "Got a plan?" he drawls.

"Several," McKay snaps, and he hooks a hand around the back of John's neck, pulls him into a kiss that reverberates like a punch to the gut, that makes John shudder, pull back and stare wide-eyed.

"You – I . . ."

McKay shakes his head. "I know everything about you," he says for the second time in a week, and John leans into that promise, as weak with it as he was the first time, hands clutching McKay's upper arms as if he can shake him into turning around and walking away, as if he can hold him in one place and make seven days of a predatory universe make some kind of goddamn sense.

"We were – in that other . . ." McKay's words are jumbled, his breath hot against John's mouth. "There. We were – we were something. And then I _saw_ you and . . ."

"Yeah," John mutters, pressing against him, because he's fucked if he'll admit he felt it too, some jolt of recognition, some impossible notion of solace beneath the cadence of McKay's _fuck you_ words.

Rodney's fingers push at the hair at the nape of his neck, pressing it back against the grain. "Get whatever you need," he says.

"For what?" John asks. He thinks of his gun.

"Leaving."

John nods and clears his throat. "There's a poster in the back seat of my car," he manages.

"That's it?"

John touches his tongue to the cut in his lip. McKay's kiss has re-opened it. "I need anything, where we're going?"

McKay smiles, half his mouth curving with approval. "No," he says, and the door's still wide-open as they kiss again, as John's hand splays tentatively against the curve of Rodney's back.

*****

John can't imagine on what planet he's considered a good security risk, but he gets a pass to the research site where Rodney's been working. He's issued a laptop with three embedded pieces of encryption software, and every internet porn site blocked. There are four square feet of workbench that nominally belong to him, and he's up to his eyes in weapons research before he knows what the hell's going on. His days have lost every marker of normalcy, and if he wears a watch, it's not because he has the luxury of clocking in and out, but because he wants the reassurance of a twenty-four hour day at his wrist while the universe outside the compound bends and twists, beyond his control.

He finds himself locked in some periodic orbit with McKay, one step forward, two steps back. There are days when he barely spares the other man a thought; days when he's likewise a blip on some faulty radar. But then there are nights when he hates himself, greedy for touch, and he ruts against McKay with a gratitude that shames him, his body jerking and shuddering with hapless relief. He wishes, more than once, that this weren't complicated, that McKay were just some hooker, some two-bit whore he could pay and send away before morning, but McKay pins him to the mattress and brushes his lips over healing wounds. It's complicated; it's necessary, and his bones ache with wanting it, with wishing he could walk away.

As near as he can figure it, he's waking from a fog, numbers spilling from his fingertips each day, equations curling across his screen with a beauty fit to clog his throat. He's far behind the others he works with, lacks the training they've had, the experience they boast, and he'd think himself a pity case if not for the afternoon when he sits in the chair and Rodney chokes on nothing but air, says, "Think of where we are in the universe," and sits down heavily when the heavens swirl slowly above their heads.

"Did I do that?" John asks.

"Uh-huh," Rodney offers.

John fucks him that night, comes inside him so hard it's a bare breath from pain. "She was gonna be my wife," he says when they're lying beside each other, tremors still racing over their skin. "Eventually. The medic I . . ."

"My sister almost died 'cause of me," Rodney whispers, and they don't roll together, but when he wakes, John's clasping Rodney's hand.

*****

Mikey finds him seven Sundays after he's stopped counting, kicks in the door of his new apartment, and all John can think as two guys hold his arms is he's so fucking glad McKay's a stubborn jerk who worked through the night instead of following him home.

He smiles when Mikey asks for his money. The next punch has him coughing up blood.

*****

He wakes – and that's some kind of miracle since he'd swear, if asked, his last breath whistled in behind broken ribs when no one showed any signs of tiring.

"I thought about shooting him," McKay says at his elbow. "And then I thought about shooting _you_."

John opens his eyes, winces at the light in the room. "I'm – " He swallows, groaning softly.

"An asshole? A jerk? A fucking _crazy person_? A – "

" – sorry," he finishes, reaching for Rodney's hand.

McKay makes a small, choked off sound, as if he's swallowing anger and finding it citrus-laced. "Well. He's in jail. And – " He rubs his thumb over the inside of John's elbow, where the veins are blue and fragile. "You and me, we're – " He clears his throat. "I bought you a poster."

*****

They share quarters, since the rules that still keep half the military personnel on Atlantis close-faced and silent don't apply to the civilian staff. John stands on the balcony outside their bedroom, ocean-air cool against his skin, and can't help but tremble with the weight of what he knows, the alchemy of chance that brought him here like this, free to name Rodney his next of kin, to ink what he can't articulate, to sign papers that legalize what he's only been able to whisper in the dead of night.

"Do you like it?" Rodney asks from the doorway behind him. He sounds strangely young, hopeful and uncertain.

"You realize," John says, laying a hand on the balcony railing and curling his fingers to willfully hold on. "My chances of getting beaten up – pretty much worse here than back home."

Rodney moves to stand behind him, rubs his nose across the nape of John's neck. "Here you're better armed."

"Against the Wraith."

"Right."

John shakes his head at how fucking ridiculous his life is. "There's that."

Rodney's lips press against his skin, curve into a smile. "You need to meet the rest of my team. If you can pull yourself away from poster-hanging duties, of course. They're waiting for us." He steps back, and when John turns to look at him, smiles, bland and smug. "Be nice to Ronon. He's . . . tall."

John makes a show of blinking slowly, as if he doesn't know it drives Rodney nuts. "Tall."

"Yeah. But it's Teyla who'll whip your ass."

John hums low in his throat. "Sure she will." Rodney grins at him, and John glances away, looks back with his game face on and his mind made up. "I'm ready."

"You're experienced," Rodney offers, as if he's correcting him, and he ambles back inside.

John cranes his neck as a ship flies overhead, a puddlejumper, swift as breath. "Experienced," he murmurs, wondering what in life could ready him for this.


End file.
